Dear friends and fellow South Africans,

Every year, on Freedom Day, our country's President bestows National Orders on individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to South Africa, and the world. Acclaimed musicians, artists and sportsmen are honoured, alongside lesser known heroes who risked their lives to save the lives of others. It is a moment that draws us together as a nation, with a shared sense of dignity and goodwill.

This year, however, is different. Monday's announcement of the 2012 National Orders nominees left no room for doubt that the ANC wants to use this year's ceremony as another opportunity to further the centennial agenda.

This year the President will bestow the Order of Mapungubwe on Mr Oliver Tambo, for "leading a militant struggle for freedom", and on Inkosi Albert Luthuli for "leading a militant peaceful struggle". The oxymoron of a "militant peaceful struggle" expresses the ANC's personal conflict of wanting to portray Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner as supportive of the ANC's deviation into an armed struggle.

That takes care of one part of the centennial agenda. In the words of the ANC's Concept Document on the centenary, every opportunity must be used this year to "leave an imprint on the South African consciousness (of) the role of the ANC as the liberator of South Africa's people". No other political formations were mentioned in the Document. No space was given to their contribution at all.

That brings us to the second part of the centennial agenda; discrediting the role of the IFP in the liberation struggle.

The continued presence of the IFP on the political landscape is a reminder of the ANC's deviation into violence. We hinder the sanctified image the ANC wants to portray. When I first read the ANC's Concept Document on the centenary, I sounded a warning to my colleagues that we were about to see the most profound and complete rewrite of history imaginable.

So I have not been surprised by the ANC's many slights since the 8th of January 2012, which range from excluding me from the unveiling of a statue of the ANC's founder, Dr Seme, who rather inconveniently was my uncle, to excluding the IFP from the unveiling of a Heroes' Arch to victims of the black-on-black violence.

By now, the ANC's revitalized anti-Buthelezi stance is becoming clear to outside observers, so much so that jokes were made about me at the Zuma wedding last weekend.

But there is no humour in what the ANC is doing. On Friday, through the National Orders Awards Ceremony, the ANC will further entrench the propaganda that the violence that rocked South Africa in the years before liberation was perpetrated by the Apartheid Government and the IFP. The implicit message is that the ANC was just a victim.

The President will bestow the Order of the Baobab, Gold, on Frank Kennan Dutton and Lwandle Wilson Magadla for "exposing the apartheid government's 'Third Force'" and for exposing "collusion between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the apartheid security forces."

Why not rather bestow the Order of the Baobab on Dr Anthea Jeffreys, for exposing the ANC's strategy of People's War that saw thousands of innocents slaughtered?

Lwandle Magadla, who passed away last year, began clandestine work for the ANC in the sixties, as a courier. By the early nineties, his extensive contacts in the intelligence community enabled him to warn ANC and UDF cadres of imminent attacks, which saved Jacob Zuma's life.

In 1991, as a warrant officer with the South African Police, Magadla and Captain Frank Dutton uncovered evidence that New Hanover Station Commander Brian Mitchell had organized the Trust Feeds Massacre of 3 December 1988, in which eleven people were killed.

On 28 April 1992, Nelson Mandela addressed a meeting of the OAU in Arusha and declared that the Trust Feeds Massacre had concretely identified a "Third Force" for the first time. On this singular foundation, the ANC constructed its extravagant artifice that a "Third Force" was responsible for the violence between the ANC and its political opponents.

Magadla retired as a warrant officer and became the ANC's Head of Intelligence in KwaZulu Natal.

After liberation, Magadla became the first Provincial Head of the National Intelligence Agency and, in 1996, he was appointed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as Chief of Special Investigations. The IFP disputed his appointment, just as we disputed the appointment of Archbishop Tutu as Chairperson of the TRC based on the fact that he was a former patron of the UDF and was aligned with the ANC.

The TRC process demanded non-partisan leadership. What it got was ANC cadres.

When Magadla passed away last year, his daughter told the media that President Jacob Zuma and National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele had constantly asked for his advice.

After the Trust Feeds Massacre saga, Captain Frank Dutton's unit was disbanded. Professor Mary de Haas describes how she, Professor Paulus Zulu and Lwandle Magadla worked "behind the scenes through a variety of contacts - political and legal - to include Dutton in the Goldstone investigations." She writes, "We were successful, and the provincial investigative arm of the commission under Major Dutton was established in September 1992, comprising mainly top-notch black African detectives hand-picked by Magadla."

The IFP disputed the findings of the Goldstone Commission, and the TRC admitted that "it received few first-hand accounts of violations committed against the IFP to draw on in the preparation of its report. It was thus forced to resort to secondary sources in an attempt to produce a balanced report on the virtual civil war that raged in KwaZulu-Natal for many years."

In the end, it was not a balanced report. But it did find in Volume 5, chapter 6, that "In the period 1990 - 1994, the ANC was responsible for killings, assaults and attacks on political opponents including members of the IFP, PAC, AZAPO and the SAP" and that the ANC contributed "to a spiral of violence in the country through the creation and arming of SDUs".

That is not something we remember on Freedom Day, or any other day.

On 5 October 1992, the ANC released a press statement that read, "The IFP leadership will serve South Africa best if it contributes towards the creation of a climate that will lead to the resolution of differences between the two parties." Twenty years later, the IFP has the same message for the ANC.

The ANC's abandonment of reconciliation with the IFP does not serve the best interests of South Africa. It serves only the interests of the ANC.

Yours in the service of our nation,

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi MP

Issued by the IFP, April 25 2012

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